The first cut is the deepest -- Edward and his scissorhands

No contemporary filmmaker has created a body of work that showcases so singular a vision as Tim Burton. With a gothic palette and an Emo sensibility, Burton creates memorable, quirky and thoroughly original stories on film. He dares his audience to dream unreal dreams while tapping into our universal desire to be unique and our fears of being alone, rejected or, worst of all, normal. Walter Chaw, filmfreakcentral.net, hosts with after-film discussion

From our first glimpse of Edward (Johnny Depp), when he shows his scissor hands to Peg (Dianne Wiest) and says, “Wait, don’t go. I’m not finished,” this film communicates all the pathos and loneliness of being an outsider. Edward Scissorhands is Burton’s take on a perfect suburban world where darkness lurks just below the endless swaths of perfectly manicured lawns and behind the door of every pastel-colored prefab. 105 minutes. Rated PG-13.

"Edward, all of Edward Gorey blacks and angles, is the product of a variation on the Frankenstein myth, his mad scientist creator (Vincent Price) dying before he can replace Edward's scissor-hands with wax appendages. Marooned at a child's emotional development, he's thus unburdened by the sort of rage for usurpation of Mary Shelly's creation; when he kills his "father" by neither accident nor design, find in Edward an adolescent's existential angst in an Oedipal split interrupted at the moment he was to be given the instruments of his ascension into "humanity" by his creator. The irony of his condition is expressed by the Stan Winston-designed shears with which he's burdened, lost on the edges of civilization (Tim Burton's twisted view of suburbia), cutting out articles from scavenged magazines and junk mail flyers and arranging them in a collage that includes a story about a boy without eyes, an ad for the kind of prefab-furniture favoured by Burton's suburbanites, and a Madonna-and-child. Our introduction to Edward, facilitated by chirpy Avon sales lady and housewife Peg, is the film's signature set-piece, allowing as it does this twisted, tragic figure to emerge as both effrontery and holy effigy. For Burton, Edward glows with the romance of an eternal child--Peter Pan in love with a memory of Wendy for eternity, adrift with the Lost Boys and working with ice." -- from Walter Chaw's review of the Anniversary Edition release of Edward Scissorhands on dvd.